It is approaching a year and a half since The New Rusyn Decade was released. Recently, I have been evaluating what progress has been made in that time. Some fantastic translations were added to our store, new articles on interesting topics have been published every so often, but beyond that…well, that is a difficult topic. The attempts at creating an online forum and bi-weekly meeting spaces failed spectacularly. The plan to have SRE’s staff advertise and promote the ideas behind the work in various regions has produced similar results, since I have not been able to find enough people to fill the necessary roles in the first place. In truth, every part of the mission for the new decade has followed this pattern. There is no energy or organic support on any level that matters. To my dismay, even the now-delisted mess that is Sovereignty has more online reviews (a high bar of having more than zero). On the plus side, the feedback I have received from Rusyn institutions and leaders has been overwhelmingly negative.
For such a short time frame, these results should not be overly concerning. Societal evolution on the level I described takes years of work and sometimes does not catch on right away. I nevertheless cannot rid myself of the feeling that TNRD has been a project dead on arrival. In fact, this feeling and the subsequent introspection and analysis over the past year is the reason for this update.
There are many things that have contributed to the general failure (so far) of this new decade experiment, but two stand out to me above the rest. First, the book is boring and ultimately a work of self-limitation. Its ideas and conclusion are ones I ultimately agree with and believe are necessary. In particular, the accomplishment of a first layer of political and cultural endeavors to serve as a necessary intermediate step toward a more ambitious and prosperous version of the Rusyn people. Among the most critical are the establishment of political parties and institutions, the recolonization of Lemkovyna, and securing recognition and autonomy for Subcarpathian Rus. It is nevertheless marred by being a Frankenstein text without a proper soul. Described within is what should happen without full reasoning as to why or what these steps are meant to lead to. The philosophical underpinnings of Sovereignty were ignored, and the core thesis of what went wrong in the revivalist era was left for another day. Even the temperament of its prose was extinguished for a lukewarm alternative.
Its reception is ultimately not surprising to me—though I did think of it this way at the time—because it is a work derived from a more radical book that was fully written and even typeset that I carved up and restitched together. As some other might people might say, it was “nerfed”. Why did I do this? In part, because I had the good sense to already intuit the second reason while not being able to fully articulate it. The fear of further ostracism was also strong, as I had only recently embarked on a self-expulsion from most of the Rusyn political world. I convinced myself to hold back the full extent of what I believed and advocated for what I believed was an effort to find a middle ground in its audience. That was a fatal decision for the work as any writer will know, but not publishing it has certainly saved me a lot of pain and future difficulty.
What is more important regarding this outcome however (which I realized some time ago), is that its radical predecessor likely wouldn’t have succeeded either. Even if I released it now there would be little point. They are books meant for a nation that actually believes in the creation of its own destiny. Not even this—they are meant for a nation that exists. Each successive year that I have been part of “Rusyn activism”, I have become more convinced that our situation is a hopeless one. I have served on the board of the largest diasporan organization in North America, have had private discussions with our elites, traveled and attempted to engage Rusyns in regions across the homeland. Not once have I come across a reservoir of vitality within even a single group of individuals necessary to change our situation. At every stop in my journey the ideas of nationalism, of radical transformation, of even the most basic steps toward sovereign thought have been rejected. In the end I have only found a society that desires to live in peaceful obscurity until its eventual dissolution. To fix this requires something philosophically deeper.
I admit that this is likely far from the update most of you were hoping for. Soon, something much longer will be published that elaborates on what I have written here. In addition, some smaller pieces on the other more secondary reasons for our lack of progress and what has worked will be made public in the weeks ahead. For now though, I can say that I have begun to understand where Sovereignty and The New Rusyn Decade failed, and the true ultimate hurdle we must overcome. There remains a part of me that holds hope of a better future and I cannot remove myself from the need to publish observations and ideas that need to be explored.
See you soon,
– S